Valen did not speak again until the fire rekindled itself. Flames clawed their way from dead embers, summoned by no hand. Elara watched them dance, their flickering tongues casting long shadows that refused to behave. One slithered upward like a rope being pulled, and another curled into the shape of a key before vanishing.
Persephone was asleep — or pretending to be — a slow, heavy purr rolling from her chest like thunder wrapped in velvet. Elara ran a thumb over the silver scar along her collarbone. It was cold, colder than the air in the study.
"Is the Blood Chapel real?" she asked.
Valen's face was unreadable. "Real enough to be remembered. And in Valeblood, memory is as good as flesh."
She stood, legs trembling but steady. The journal on the desk had stilled. No more lines wrote themselves. Not yet. But the spiral on her palm pulsed once, hard, as if approving her resolve.
"Then we go."
---
The path to the Blood Chapel was not a hallway.
It was a staircase — downward, endless, but not made of stone. The walls were red velvet draped over something that breathed. Each step sank slightly, as though the manor itself was watching their descent and letting them through one clenched layer at a time.
Persephone clung to Elara's shoulders like a shadow wearing fur. "Don't bleed here," she warned, her voice rasped with tension. "Not even a paper cut. It sings to blood. That's why it's sealed."
Valen kept ahead, torch in hand. The flame bent toward him, not upward.
"You've been here before," Elara said.
He didn't answer.
Eventually, the velvet parted.
---
The Blood Chapel was not a chapel. It was a wound.
Vast, circular, and sunken into the earth's memory like a forgotten cry, the chamber's ceiling stretched impossibly high — yet no matter how far one looked, it never ended. Candlelight spilled from sconces shaped like weeping faces. Pew-like stones jutted from the floor in spirals, worn with age and ash.
In the center, an altar.
It wasn't built. It had grown — bone-white, with veins that pulsed faintly in rhythm with Elara's own heart.
The moment she stepped inside, her spiral burned. Not with pain. With hunger.
Valen halted, gaze fixed on the altar.
"This is where the first bargain was made."
Persephone hissed low. "And where the last one will be broken."
Elara approached the altar. The journal appeared in her hand unbidden, summoned by proximity.
A page flipped.
> Here lies the fifth: not a ghost, but a guardian. Bound in blood. Named in silence. To awaken it is to awaken him.
"Him," Elara murmured. "The one beneath."
The altar's pulse quickened.
A memory surged — but it wasn't hers.
A woman with her face, screaming. A child with no eyes, singing lullabies backwards. A man — tall, beautiful, stitched from moonlight — offering his wrist.
And the chapel singing.
The altar cracked open.
---
A hand rose first. Pale. Elegant. Bloodless. Then a face — not dead, not alive. Something between. Eyes like wine gone sour. A smile that knew too much.
Valen knelt.
Elara didn't.
"Who are you?" she asked.
The figure stepped fully into the candlelight. No blood dripped from him, but every step he took echoed like a heartbeat.
"I am the fifth," he said. "The promise made and never kept. The song half-sung. The guardian of the buried name."
Persephone's claws dug into Elara's shoulder. "Don't answer him. Not with your true voice. He listens too well."
But the fifth already had her scent.
He turned to Elara, smiling.
"You wore the spiral. You remembered the fourth. You carry the echo of the Never-Was."
She held her ground. "And I'll carry more. If I have to."
He laughed — soft, musical, wrong.
"You don't carry us," he said. "We carry you."
And the spiral burned anew.
---
Elara fell.
Not physically. But into a memory so thick it tasted like rust and ash. She stood on a battlefield of marble and mirrors, watching herself shatter again and again.
The fifth hovered above.
"You must choose," he said.
"Choose what?"
"A face. A fate. A form."
And he showed her:
— Herself as a child, writing stories no one would ever read. — Herself in an asylum, scribbling spirals on padded walls. — Herself, older, victorious, crowned in ash and bone.
"One leads to power. One to madness. One to peace."
She shook her head. "They all lead back here."
He grinned. "Correct."
And the chapel sang.
---
She awoke kneeling.
Valen helped her up. He looked paler than before.
"Did you choose?" he asked.
Elara looked at the fifth, who was now part of the altar again — watching, waiting, sealed by song and silence.
"I remembered," she said.
And the journal bled ink:
> Five seen. One still sleeps beneath the glass that forgets.
Valen closed the book.
"Then we go north," he said.
Persephone growled. "The Glass Crypt?"
Elara didn't flinch. "Let it forget. I won't."
The spiral pulsed.
The chapel exhaled.
And the manor shifted once more.